Post No. Four, Day 136 LVG-
I like taking photos, and I absolutely love looking at photos of past adventures, but I do not actually love the laborious task of going through and editing all the photos I take. Maybe I should say it this way- its not that I don’t like the actual task of editing the photos, but rather I don’t like the time commitment necessary, or to be more accurate, the lack of time I have available to commit to it. I feel, more often than not, that I am in irons, to borrow a nautical term, and can’t make any headway against this monstrous hurricane of photos, which ironically, I continuously unleash upon myself. As such, I have NOT edited any of our photos of our voyage down the east coast, and instead have concentrated my efforts on the photos capturing our time since we left Florida- what people really want to see anyways, right? So, perhaps in a decade or two you will see the former, but for now, please enjoy the kodachrome splendor of our foray into the Bahamas…
We left Miami at 4:30 in the morning and pointed the bow east. Coconut Grove, for all that it can offer, is actually a very very shallow area, and maneuvering our deep keeled boat through the crowded mooring field and down the narrow, I’ll say it again, shallow channel, out into Biscayne Bay proper, in the dead of night no less, was a wee bit stress inducing, shaving off two or possibly three years of my life. We made it though, and then motored across the bay and down past Stiltsville, a prohibition era community of, lets call them “drinking shacks”, built on stilts over the shallow water, but just far enough off shore to be legal, or not illegal. Gliding past the silhouettes of these historied buildings on a moonless night, with Miami’s lights painting the backdrop was a view I will not long forget. By sunrise, we had made it to the open ocean, we could see Miami’s skyscrapers to our stern, and had only a little thing called the Gulf Stream to worry about ahead of us. All that waiting in Miami paid off, and the weather window we chose made the 50nm crossing a non-event. Entering the pass into Bimini on the other side however, was a bit more exciting. The markers for the channel are missing, and the channel itself is a shallow mess of drifting, shoaling sand bars. And to make things worse, it was very close to low tide. A boat abeam of us seemed to be eager to enter the channel, so we slowed our forward speed and let them take the first crack at it, reckoning that we could follow their path in safely. Things looked good, until it was obvious, they had slowed to a stop right at the entrance. I pulled them up on the radio, and sure enough they had gone aground! It wasn’t a hard grounding thankfully, and they were able to bounce their way across the sand bar and continue on. Seeing this, we took a slightly more southern approach to the channel, but still came within inches of scraping bottom. However, all’s well that ends well, and a half hour later we were safely tied up to the dock at Bimini’s Blue Water Marina, our first foreign port aboard the Saint Robert!
Bimini doesn’t seem to have much going for it, the town at least, and is more just a close and convenient check in port for boats coming over from Miami. Even so, we stayed there for three nights, one at dock, two at anchor, waiting for some fierce wind to pass us by. Unfortunately, that same fierce wind really gave us some trouble the afternoon we decided to move from the dock to the anchorage… Maneuvering a sailboat in reverse is notoriously difficult, let alone reversing into 20 knots of wind. Add to that the tight quarters of the marina and calamity soon struck. The strong wind pushed us sideways towards the other docked boats as we tried to turn for the exit, and the nose of our dinghy, sitting on its platform at the stern of our boat, clipped, by a mere inch, the dinghy hanging from a neighboring boat’s davits!! Hindsight is 20/20, but in the moment, the only thing I could do to prevent further collision between the two boats was to keep the throttle in full and try to bounce out of the docks. Once clear, we quickly tied up to the fuel dock, and ran over to inspect the damage, which consisted of some bent tubing and broken fittings for their davit structure. We. Felt. Horrible. Fortunately, boaters are intrinsically good, understanding, and forgiving people, and after some structural investigating, we settled upon an agreed repair and inconvenience cost, and left (I am hoping) with no ill will. I wore my embarrassment and shame like a scarlet letter on my forehead for the next week or so. Damn.
We left the protection of Bimini and headed across the Great Bahama Banks to Nassau on a windless overnight passage. Highlights included hooking a small Sand Diver, Synodus intermedius (according to our fish book), which was duly snagged by a shark or something equally insidious, so that once we reeled it in, only the front half of our catch greeted us. We promptly returned it to the sea. The only other event occurred when we were passing through a narrow pass between islands called the Northwest Channel at two in the morning, and almost collided head on with an ill-lit approaching motor boat towing a string of two dozen bouncing small rowboats, or dinghies perhaps. Having not seen a boat in the last eight hours, this was quite the surprise. Though I can’t prove anything, later I heard from another cruiser that their dinghy was stolen, cut loose, in the dead of night while they were anchored off the Berry Islands, which are literally just east of the Northwest Channel where we encountered this ocean train of towed small craft! I am about 99% positive that this boat we saw was the midnight bandit dinghy thief, and all the bouncing boats being towed behind them were contraband appropriated from unwitting cruisers, heading off to be sold on ebay or shady used boat dealers in Florida’s back bayous.
Arriving to Nassau at 10:15am the next morning was exhilarating! Sailing into the harbor, past the solitary white lighthouse, past the towering cruise ships, and anchoring right below the Sir Sidney Poitier Bridge from Paradise Island to the mainland was a homecoming of sorts. I had been to Nassau, a month shy of 16 years previous, and had walked across the high span of that bridge many many times during our weeklong stay in Nassau, waiting to board our floating university ship to participate in Semester at Sea. I, along with about 650 other vagabond students, subsequently circumnavigated the world, learning a lot about this crazy planet, and more about ourselves.
This time my stay in Nassau was quite different however: an ant infested one star hotel on the edge of town vs my own floating sanctuary anchored in the harbor, reckless nights out at the Atlantis Casino with nothing to lose (but not much to lose) vs one $20 wager (loosing) on roulette, a summer’s worth of pizza delivery savings in the bank vs the account of a responsible adult in early retirement, a wide-eyed and un-initiated view of the world and the future vs the cautious skepticism of a seasoned traveler and father of three young boys in a foreign land… differences aide, the similarities were overstated: the town hadn’t changed much, the beers were still cold, and I was still enamored with the feeling of inserting myself, however temporarily, into the fabric of another nation and culture. Sharing that love with my wife and boys more than justified all the tribulations we had gone through to get here.
Our time here went quick, then slow- a day or two after we arrived, Kacey’s parents flew in for a weeklong visit: we toured the town, hiked the Queen’s staircase, rolled cigars, spent A LOT of time at the Atlantis Resort waterpark, ate fish at the fish fry, partied at Junkanoo Beach, sailed to the deserted Sand Cay for an amazing afternoon on our own private island, and then spent more time at the waterpark. Did I mention the waterpark was amazing? But as with all things, their time with us came to an end, and that end happened to coincide with the onset of some unfavorable weather. Thus, after ten days of fun in the sun, Steve and Val left, and then we were hunkered down, trying not to be blown overboard for an additional week, waiting for the weather to turn. It did in due course, and we eagerly upped anchor and set sail on the day before Christmas Eve.
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